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At another phase in the therapy, when a pathogenic mother-introject began to emerge more and more upon the investigative scene, she muttered in a low but intense voice, to herself, `` I hate that woman inside me ''!!

I could evoke no further elaboration from her about this ; ;

but a few seconds later she was standing directly across the room from me, looking me in the eyes and saying in a scathingly condemnatory tone, `` Your father despises you ''!!

Again, I at first misconstrued this disconcertingly intense communication, and I quickly cast through my mind to account for her being able to speak, with such utter conviction, of an opinion held by my father, now several years deceased.

Then I replied, coldly, `` If you despise me, why don't you say so, directly ''??

She looked confused at this, and I felt sure it had been a wrong response for me to make.

It then occurred to me to ask, `` Is that what that woman told you ''??

She clearly agreed that this had been the case.

I realized, now, that she had been showing me, in what impressed me as being a very accurate way, something her mother had once said to her ; ;

it was as if she was showing me one of the reasons why she hated that woman inside her.

What had been an unmanageably powerful introject was now, despite its continuing charge of energy disconcerting to me, sufficiently within control of her ego that she could use it to show me what this introjected mother was like.